Damsels in Distress (***1/2)

Watch this for five minutes and you’ll probably know if you’ll like its alternate-reality take on college life, as seen by a quartet of female roommates at the fictional Seven Oaks. Greta Gerwig, Ben Stiller’s mumbling love interest in Greenberg, plays the much perkier, talkier Violet, leader of the quartet, who in the space of the film’s first five minutes nearly faints from “acrid” B.O., discusses “the problem with contemporary social life,” laments that an “atmosphere of male barbarism prevails” at her institution, extols the virtues of dating “sad sacks” and plain-looking and/or unintellient men, and thwarts a potential suicide. Violet and her stylized dialogue are the creation of director Whit Stillman, who with just four films (in 22 years) is easily one of the more stylistically distinctive filmmakers around. All of his films feature what might be called the intellectually aspirational class, twentysomethings who might in ten years be Woody Allen characters, but here it’s in a playful way.

As the title may suggest, the movie has the flavor of a period piece, but one in which a 1990s song* is a “golden oldie” and anal sex is (obliquely) referred to. Violet dreams of initiating a “dance craze,” and a Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers-inspired musical number caps the film. At the same time, it doesn’t really seem like any actual old movies, although it slightly made me think of the recent French musical 8 Women. Of Violet’s friends, the one played by Megalyn Echikunwoke made me laugh the most by repeatedly issuing Anglo-Nigerian accented-warnings about “playboy-operator type” guys. Much of what amused me about the movie is hard to convey, but comes down to its unique brand of whimsy. For example, at Seven Oaks, there are no Greek-letter frats, only Roman letter ones, where the inhabitants are so dumb that they try to commit suicide by jumping from a second-story window.

The plot has something to do with Violet and her friends’ crusade to purge the campus of its coarser aspects, and some romantic mismatches, but, really, you won’t care about how any of that resolves itself. I’m not sure if Stillman intends to say anything about college, romantic attraction, suicide, the value of intelligence, lying, or any of the other things these damsels discuss, but that in no way distressed me.

* “Another Night” by Real McCoy

IMDb link

viewed 4/25/12 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 4/25/12 and 4/26/12

Like Crazy (**1/2)

I suppose in a perfect world everyone would have one all-consuming love affair, one that, much later, will be recalled in a gauzily lit, cineme verité montage of sexual euphoria, aimless conversation, and clear-skinned smiles. Soft piano music will be the soundtrack. It will seem much like the first half hour of this evocative romance from Drake Doremus.

The problem is, it’s never much more than evocative. The young L.A. college sweethearts (Anton Yelchin, Felicity Jones) seem nice enough, but Doremus employs the sloppy shorthand of taste as a proxy for actual character traits. That is, the fact that they both like a certain Paul Simon song (alluded to in the film’s title) doesn’t tell us anything much about these people. Nor does the improvised dialogue, although it’s delivered well. As circumstance requires separation—she has to return to her native England—I had no idea whether I thought they should get back together or not. Or maybe I didn’t care as much as I ought to have.


Doremus’s film also evokes, sometimes effectively, the way feelings fade with separation. As with the separated couple in Going the Distance—a more mainstream, yet actually more substantive, look at a long-distance relationship—technology fails to take the place of being in the same place. The [slight spoiler ahead] his-and-hers side relationships—his with a coworker, hers with a neighbor—that follow seem perfunctory, as if Doremus is trying to balance out things. We never actually see the early stages of these infidelities, where, presumably, the separated lovers try to resist temptation. Or maybe they don’t try. The alternative partners do seem in each case adoring, though they don’t share a taste for Paul Simon and fine whiskey. And taste is important, but, in the case of this tasteful film, isn’t always enough.

IMDB link

viewed 10/20/11 at Annenberg [Philadelphia Film Festival screening]

Stone of Destiny (***)

In 1950, Glasgow University student Ian Hamilton (Charlie Cox), hoping to stir up Scottish nationalism, led an effort to steal the venerated titular stone from Westminster Abbey in London. Hamilton’s account of the adventure is the basis for this straightforward accounting of the event.

Writer-director Charles Martin Smith (an American-born Canadian) doesn’t attempt to depict the history of Scottish nationalism, or the reasons for it. Instead, this is simply a lightly comic rendering of an interesting footnote in the history of a movement that continues to have force today. Robert Carlyle plays the university head who inspired Hamilton.

IMDB link

viewed at Prince (Philadelphia Film Festival) and reviewed 3/31/09